Whatever Happened to…Text-Based Games?
You see a table, on the table is a loaf of bread, a vial of poison, and a shiny sword.
> put poison on bread
You cannot do that right now
>take table
That item is too heavy for you!
>pick up sword
I don’t understand
>take sword
You take the sword
Any gamer over a certain age will be familiar with the above scenario. The careful choice of verbs and nouns, the frustratingly specific way of answering a simple question, and of course spending the first 10 minutes after booting seeing how the game would react to such commands as “have sex”, “do a poo” and “wet yourself”.
I am of course talking about text-based games. The original staple of systems like the Commodore PET and the ZX Spectrum, these games were demonstrations of where gaming could go, but they did it without the help of fancy 3d graphics or drawn-out cutscenes.
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